My home away from home

Strip Blackjack

One of the first large scale Java projects I worked on was my Macintosh Application Environment Java libray. My goal was to create a full GUI that allowed developers to create rich client-server applications that would run within a browser. I had obviously written a demo app using MAE to test all the widgets but I felt I needed to port an existing Mac app to see how well the library worked in real situations. Since I hadn't much to choose from, I chose to port my fist Mac application, a simple Blackjack game. I was able to complete the port in just under a week.

The rules are very easy to learn. The only difference with regular Blackjack is that if a player gets 21 points or less with five cards he automatically wins (there is no room for another card on the screen). The girl has to hit on totals less than 17. Every piece of cloth is worth $100. For those of you who are more interested in the girl than in the game there is a cheat mode that allows you to know her total. Finally, I just want to tell you that although the game's first screen loads quite quickly, after choosing Start New Game from the menu, the applet has to load about 290 Kb of data and this can take up to five minutes on slow connections, so be patient. This program was therefore primarily ment for Intranets and NCs, environments where it would probably be much more successful than that boring Windows Solitaire...